This biography of Yates McDaniel of the Associated Press chronicles the intrepid life of a foreign war correspondent in World War II, who accepted enormous risk to provide American, Canadian, and Australian newspapers with accurate and riveting firsthand coverage of the war. He was the last Western reporter to leave Nanking in 1937 as the Japanese stormed through the city, murdering tens of thousands of people. He was among the last to leave Hankow in 1938 just before it fell to the Japanese. And as British-controlled Singapore teetered on the verge of falling to the Japanese in February 1942, Yates again was the last to leave. As Japanese planes reduced large sections of Singapore to rubble, he wrote one of the epic stories of American journalism. He covered virtually the entire war in Asia from its beginnings in China in 1931 to General Douglas MacArthur's liberation of the Philippines in 1945. To follow Yates is to follow the Pacific war. The equal of legendary World War II correspondents such as Theodore White of Time magazine, George Weller of the Chicago Daily News. Cecil Brown of CBS Radio, and Ernie Pyle of Scripps-Howard, McDaniel was highlighted by the Associated Press for his bravery, boasting that during the war he was the "first to arrive and last to leave." And yet, when McDaniel died in Florida in 1983 after spending his postwar years reporting for the Associated Press in Detroit and Washington, few outside his immediate circle paid much notice, and just a handful remembered his stunning accomplishments. Book jacket.